Citizens' Participation and Anti-Corruption : the Advocacy And
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Ben Elers, Angelos Giannakopoulos, Dirk Tänzler Citizens’ Participation and Anti-corruption: The Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres of Transparency International and the EU-funded research project ALACs 1. Introduction The fight against corruption within member and candidate states of the European Union (EU) to date has made obvious that there is a gap between centrally designed anti-corruption measures and public perceptions of corruption.1 Especially regarding South East European countries like Romania and Bulgaria but also EU-member states like Greece or candidate states like Turkey, widespread corruption in terms of both petty and grand corruption still remains a serious problem jeopardising institutional change and citizens’ trust to state. In turn, in central European countries -- especially in Germany -- recent cases of “white collar” corruption (Siemens, Volkswagen) reveal that, while national and international regimes in the fight against corruption have changed by setting a more rigorous anti-corruption frame, perceptions of what “deviant behaviour” is do not simply fit with the new situation. “Wrongdoing” and corrupt conduct are still perceived by private business and political elites either as a necessary evil or in the best case as a “peccadillo”. Against this background informing the public, i.e. raising public awareness about the problem has increasingly become over the recent years one of the most important aspects in the anti- corruption field in Europe. Important anti-corruption EU-institutions like the European Anti- Fraud Office (OLAF) underline that the fight against corruption requires the involvement of civil society, including the media, universities, and the public (OLAF 2009). In order to enhance public participation in the fight against corruption, the internationally leading coalition against corruption, Transparency International (TI), has launched since some years an anti-corruption tool entitled Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre (ALAC). The establishment of the ALACs within the frame of the already existing National Chapters of TI has started with three initial ALACs in Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and FYR Macedonia becoming within a few years a global anti-corruption tool spreading currently in all continents (see Table 1 below). The centres demonstrate that people do become actively involved in the fight against corruption when they are provided with simple, credible and viable citizen participation mechanisms to do so. The ALACs provide victims and/or witnesses of corruption with practical assistance to pursue complaints and address their grievances. The ALAC is a citizen participation tool that links the public interest with private incentives for action on the part of the individual. Directly linked to the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres of TI is the research project “Promotion of Participation and Citizenship in Europe through the ‘Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres (ALACs)’ of TI. Analysis and Enhancement of an Anti-corruption Tool to Enable Better Informed and Effective Citizen Participation in Europe” (short title “ALACs”) supported within the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. The research project is funded in the frame of a new innovative support instrument of the 1 About the relevance of perceptions of corruption to anti-corruption measures see the published results of the research project „Crime and Culture“ supported within the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission at: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/crimeandculture/index.htm. In the project perceptions of corruption have been comparatively analysed in the countries Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Croatia, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom. See especially the final report of the project available at: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/crimeandculture/docs/STREP_Crime_and_Culture_Final_Project_Report.pdf 1 European Commission called “Research for the Benefit of Specific Groups-Civil Society Organisations” launched for the first time two years ago demonstrating the increasing interest of the EU-institutions towards scientific support of public engagement in a variety of action fields within society. The ALACs-project is a unique joint venture founded by three types of social actors with different but corresponding interests, competencies and objectives: 1. The civil society activists from the National Chapters of TI, who seek democratic development in their societies through enhanced citizen participation; 2. The TI-Secretariat, which is interested in improving its organisational structure by implementing new techniques of knowledge management (including a database) in its ALAC network Europe- and worldwide; 3. The research performers, who aim at enhancing knowledge about the cultural conditions necessary for the implementation of anti-corruption policies by establishing an innovative action research approach. Conducted by practitioners, professionals and academics, this approach will result in the formulation of a pioneering and empirically-grounded theory of the practice of the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres. The main objectives of the ALACs research project are therefore: 1. to understand the nature of interaction between loose coupled network practitioners and professionals from TI, and 2. to analyse the cultural conditions necessary for implementing a specific management method and a mechanism to increase citizen participation in the countries participating in the project. The consortium of the ALACs-project is composed of eight National Chapters of TI in the countries Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Ireland, Finland, Lithuania, Hungary and the TI-Secretariat in Berlin on one side as well as of scholars based at the Universities of Konstanz (co-ordinator), Duisburg-Essen and Warwick on the other. The research project started in September 2009 and will run until August 2012. Regarding enhancement of citizens’ participation against corruption related to the worldwide anti-corruption efforts of the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres on the one hand as well as regards the ALACs EU-project on the other, this article contains the following: In the second chapter a detailed description of the ALAC-tool of TI as an innovative anti-corruption mechanism will be provided. In the third chapter core aspects of the co-operation between academics and anti-corruption activists in the frame of the ALACs-project will be highlighted, against the background of which in the fourth and last chapter fundamental dimensions of this unique co-operation in improving citizens’ participation in the anti-corruption field will be underlined. 2. Overall framework und characteristics of the ALAC-tool 2.1 The overall framework Compared, for example, with Greenpeace, a strong, hierarchical NGO with a dominant management represented by the headquarters and a large number of directed and financially- bound “foot troops,” TI represents the ideal type of network for a social movement: a collection of autonomous and independent single and corporate actors unified by a common anti-corruption goal (De Sousa 2005). There is no large bureaucracy or headquarters (with big overhead), but only a handful of charismatic leaders and a secretariat that loosely bind widespread and spontaneous activities into a grassroots organisation. Moral integrity, not formal hierarchical status or position of power, is the linchpin of integration in such a movement. The moral integrity of TI has been the secret of the movement’s success in the last 15 years, especially in countries undergoing large-scale socio- political transitions. In the post-socialist, but also in the post-colonial countries (in Africa, for example), people see the state institutions as the source and motor of corruption, rife with 2 functional deficiencies, structural inequality, poverty and lack of personal and political liberty – in short, the ground zero of cultural and societal underdevelopment. After 1990, the state institutions of the Western developed countries came under similar suspicion because they were perceived as responsible for the corruption and crisis in the countries of the so-called “third world” and for the contemporary state of the political and economic world order. Against this backdrop, TI represented an alternative of unpolitical politics, i.e. politics of non(-professional)- politicians. TI became a model for activists all over the world to enforce citizen participation and civil society. As a morally-grounded institution, TI gained strong legitimation and was thus able to greatly impact political agenda-setting worldwide (Keck/Sikkink1998, Marschall 2002, Eigen 2003). Since the times of German sociologist Max Weber, organisational theory assumes that social institutions begin as charismatic organisations and must be transformed into formalised structures if they are to endure (Weber 1964). Looking back, one sees that TI began to do just that, professionalising and formalising the anti-corruption movement by inventing and implementing effective management and citizen participation tools, which did and will continue to optimise the work of the activists and the organisation as a whole. In consequence of the specific character of TI as a global informal network, one can expect that this transformation from a personalised to a formalised structure will generate a new type of organisation typical for global politics in the post-modern knowledge society. It should be assumed that not so much power (or law) but practical knowledge will be